Human Figures

(After Pawel Althamer’s ‘Monika and Pawel’)

Not the old mystery, the craft in which
mallet and chisel worked recalcitrant stone –
here are no immaculate surfaces, marble’s
envious imitation of life, Pygmalion’s ivory girl.

This is all extrusion: bodies raked, encrusted,
wax spread over wax with a rough spatula,
leaving surgical scar-seams; smears, piercings
and dismemberment, the faces obscured.

This couple, inverted, the guts of beasts pulled
over their fingertips, seem to have been skinned
to make an écorché, a new Marsyas, flayed,
re-covered, made freakishly whole.

Naked, they might be two dolls, leaking bran,
a man and woman of grass whose moth-eaten parts
hint at historic obscenities, pieces of human parchment,
scraped, stuffed with hair, dry as tinder to the fire.

Mediterranean

Assembled, batched, loaded, men
and women stand upright, packed
skin to skin for the unpiloted crossing.
Land’s a mirage, release a fever dream.
No ferryman will come to bring them
from their sea-sweat, hand them gently ashore.

The small boat dips, and they’re thrown,
lurch in blind unison to its yawning side.
A woman, unlisted, unaccounted for,
lips blistered, voice dried dumb
in the throat, falls through salt and sand,
her bright wrap winding and unwinding
as she passes from clear air to swallowing
dark, kelp-tangled, leaching blue into blue.

More follow, pitched from furnace heat
to quenching cold. Stains mark a predator’s
practised rip and tear; an oil-skin packet,
a few loose papers, the only evidence of a life,
float on the glittering mirror of the sea.

Cold Harbour

The tick of water and rust in a distant pipe
startles me from sleep in this borrowed house.
Soft pulse of a digital clock, throb of blood,
beat of a defective heart: systole, diastole.

Wind rises, groaning and cuffing, smacks
at the window, rolls a can down the gutter.
A tarpaulin snaps, rises into a blue sail
lashed to an empty skip, subsides.

I count the things I’ve left behind: my
linen bag, a little peen hammer, the red
hod for carrying coal. The wooden level
that lay snug in my hand a small boat.

We’d lost our bearings, we were havenless.
The child in her cot sighs, breathes strenuously,
as if she would launch a howl at the white wall,
grumbles at the cold she can’t precisely name.

Unspoken

At Lisbon’s Central Station, a wall
of decorative tiles, the ubiquitous
azulejos, and leaning against it,
a man whose left hand is injured.

The fingers are missing, severed
between proximal and metacarpal,
the raw extremity covered
with a thick transparent gel.

The man’s arm’s in a sling
and he seems to be at ease
with his truncated limb, already
used to living with disfigurement.

How can I not look at him, at it,
not wonder how he has come
to this, standing quietly visible,
the white bone casually exposed?

I stand in the smoky hall,
a dumb observer, as he presents
his savage wound, wordless,
speaking beyond language.

In Perpignan

Spooning ice cream from a tall
metal cup I ask myself, if I were more devout
would licking the sweet drops from the rim
of this chilly vessel feel improper?

In the cathedral I gaze at stained glass, peer at stone:
the smashed heads of robed figures, men who found
themselves on the wrong side in a war I can barely name,
a family of eight, each child trim in its lace bonnet,
a cadaver tomb, the shrunken effigy and his worldly double
stacked, one above, one below, behind iron railings.

Skirting the elaborate pulpit (‘notable’, says the guidebook)
I pass the stoup’s lime-streaked shell, decline
its dry blessing and shuffle out of the dimness.

Coughing curtain dust, pushing at the studded door,
I pretend I haven’t seen the man sitting outside,
more frankly begging.

Imogen Forster lives and works in Edinburgh. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University (2017). Her pamphlet The Grass Boat was published in 2021 by Mariscat Press, Edinburgh. It was reviewed by David Morley in Poetry Review, Autumn ’22, and the title poem appears in Best Scottish Poems 2021, the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology. Her second pamphlet, with the provisional title Adverse Camber, has been twice shortlisted and is seeking its place in print.